Greek archaeology

Making merry at Knossos

ARCHAEOLOGY is an inexact science, as Sir Arthur Evans, a flamboyant early practitioner, knew. However painstaking the digging process, an excavator can always promote an extravagant theory under the guise of interpreting the finds.

Illustration by Daniel Pudles

As he started to unearth a prehistoric mound at Knossos in Crete at the turn of the 20th century, Evans put his imagination into high gear. He rebuilt parts of a 3,500-year-old palace in modernist style using cement and reconstructed fragmentary frescoes to suit his views on Bronze Age religion and politics.

Evans boldly argued that the Minoans, as he called the early islanders, shunned warfare, conveniently forgetting about the ruined watchtowers and fortification walls he had already identified elsewhere in Crete. In public lectures and a stream of articles after the first world war he presented a vision of a lost island paradise. Disillusioned artists and intellectuals were entranced by the idea of Minoans living close to nature, playfully leaping over bulls and worshipping a benign mother goddess.

Among those who swallowed the Knossos myth were Sigmund Freud, James Joyce and Pablo Picasso, though none of them visited the site. Others who toured the reconstructed palace, including Evelyn Waugh, were more sceptical. Yet the magic persisted. A later generation, among them Crete's 1960s hippy residents, saw the Minoans as an early blueprint for feminism and anti-war protests.

Cathy Gere, a British academic, has written a stylish and original cultural history of Knossos, which slots Evans and the Minoans into a broader, modernist world. Anxiety is always present. The Minoans' most fervent admirers, Ms Gere notes, were all “trying to make sense of some of the weightiest themes of modernity—the death of God, the woman question, the human appetite for war.”

Evans's own pacifism was inspired by his experience of covering anti-Turkish rebellions in the Balkans as a correspondent for the Manchester Guardian. At Knossos he hired both Muslim and Christian workmen. Once a year he made them dance together in the ruins, a private reconciliation effort after a brutal episode of ethnic cleansing in Crete.

Contrary to Evans's flowery interpretation, the Minoans appear to have been as bloodthirsty as other early eastern Mediterranean societies. Two excavations in 1982 revealed evidence of human sacrifice outside a village close to Knossos, and of ritual cannibalism involving children in a town-house close to the palace. In the 1990s Greek and foreign researchers re-explored the network of military roads and watchtowers in eastern Crete that Evans had chosen to ignore. Studies of Bronze Age weaponry showed that Cretan sword and dagger designs were widely copied. For all their playfulness, the Minoans were serious about waging war.